How To Write A Chicago Format Research Paper Bibliography

When writing a paper in Chicago style, students will have to adjust the way that they write. There are slight differences between APA, MLA and Chicago style. Although these differences may seem unimportant to the student, the teacher will definitely notice if the paper was formatted incorrectly. To get a top score, students should make sure that they have listed every source in their bibliography and formatted their bibliography properly.

Tracking Notes

Students can make their job much easier by being careful ad precise at taking notes. When the student begins researching their paper they should set aside several pages in their notebook to track every source that they read through. Every source that was used for ideas, quotes or data must be listed in the bibliography. By tracking the sources in one spot during the research process, students can make creating the bibliography much easier in the future.

Get an Example

Writing manuals are never easy to read. In a writing manual, each source is divided by the number of authors and the format. To figure out the correct way to format each source, students have to flip through pages of pages of information in the writing manual. Rather than waste time with looking up each citation style, students can just use an example document. In the example bibliography, students can quickly scan for sources that come from the same type of format or writer.

The Basics

The bibliography should always go at the end of the document. It should be placed on a new numbered page and the title, “Bibliography”, should be placed at the top. Afterward, each entry will be single spaced, but the space in between each source will be double-spaced. Authors should always be listed in alphabetical order. When an author's name is not included, the source can be listed according to the title of the work. If this happens, the indefinite and definite articles should not be used for alphabetizing it.

Unlike some citation styles, Chicago style does not require the first line in the source to be indented. The second, third or any additional lines in the same source must be indented by half an inch. This helps the reader to easily find where new sources begin in the list. Since sources matter the most in Chicago style, it is important for each one to be easy to read, correctly formatted and simple to find.